Little Tin Openers: Ann Quin's Aesthetic of Touch

Abstract

Although critics have often noted Ann Quin's ‘literary geometry’ (Jordan 2020: 151) and ‘visual composition’ (Stevick 1989: 238), little has been made of the way her use of shapes and surfaces relates to contemporaneous developments in 1960s visual arts. Taking as its starting point Quin's specific art-world context, this essay reads Three (1966) in the light of post-war artists’ anxieties surrounding figuration and their turn towards the potentially generative effects and affects of disfiguration. I go on to consider how Niklaus Largier's account of aesthetic experience as ‘touch and being touched’ is fitting for the way Three makes of literature a plane of perception where figures move tenuously in and out of reach. But while Quin's characters look vainly to figures – human, inanimate, whole, fractured – in pursuit of aesthetic experiences, such ‘touch’ is usually withheld, deferred, or even made violent. What emerges is a view of Quin's particular mode as setting forth an aesthetic of touch where objects trigger not exalted experience so much as marking post-war conditions to be reckoned with, however elusive, equivocal, and resistant to resolution they may be. With this, Three seems to endorse the idea that an artwork at best can be an ‘emotive form’, as Donald Judd put it in 1967, with its characters typifying late-modernist concerns surrounding representation, what makes ‘good’ art, and performance more generally.

Keywords:

• Ann Quin
• aesthetic of touch
• aesthetic experience
• disfiguration
• post-war art

Ann Quin and 1960s Art

Roaming in and out of literary, sculptural and painterly milieux in Britain, the US and elsewhere, Ann Quin cultivated her distinctive yet various approaches to the novel form. Irreducible to any one school, group, or even genre, her writing marks by point of convergence a host of art movements and practices in the ‘boom-period for modern art’ that was the 1960s (Thompson 1964: 7). From her silent John Cage-inspired reading at the ICA in 1969 (which can be viewed doubly as performance anxiety and a staged Happening), her reliance on shapes and colours for prompting bodily experiences on and off the page (‘Paintings turned me on or was it just that spiral stairway?’ Quin to Larry Goodell about the Guggenheim: 1966), to her collagist forms and Pop cut-outs, Quin let herself rove freely, and often tumultuously, between high and low. The sculptor John Carter, who was introduced to her at the Chelsea Hotel in New York by the painter Frank Bowling, remembers how Quin ‘was keen on much of the hippie visual material of the period’ (2020), while her ‘Quinology’ reading list for Goodell comprises a healthy blend of Russian classics, Simone Weil, the letters of Van Gogh, the plays of Ibsen, and the poems of William Carlos Williams. Before setting off to the US on Harkness and D.H. Lawrence fellowships, Quin was secretary to Carel Weight in the Painting School of the Royal College of Art in London. She had secured the job with the help of Paddy Kitchen, a fellow writer from Brighton who was assistant registrar at the College and, from 1960, married to Bowling. Kitchen also organized exhibitions for the Tate Gallery, and she and Quin frequented exhibitions together. Quin could also count among her friends the artists Jane Percival and Pauline Boty (Butler 2013: 23), and had herself taken a part-time course in painting. Notably, the period in which she worked at the RCA (1959–1963) was during Pop art's incubation there, indeed mirroring David Hockney's years of enrolment, and for a while she dated the Pop artist Billy Apple and ghost-wrote two General Studies assignments for him: ‘B.B.'s Second Manifesto’ and ‘Untitled (Neh Man It's Like This)’, circa 1962. She was ‘furious and saddened’ to miss the 1962 Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate Gallery but made it to the 1963 Bacon/Moore exhibition at Marlborough Gallery (Williams 2013: 179). At this time, Bacon was working in the basement of the College. While this may all seem prosaic enough, Quin's sustained engagement with prolific 1960s art and artists is not to be neglected, especially given the broader cultural landscape of post-war Britain. As Alan Bowness remembers,

it was a very small world in those days. I think people will have no idea nowadays. For example, when I started teaching in ’57 I was the only person in the country who was concerned with teaching nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. (2007–2010)

Eduardo Paolozzi too remembers ‘a curious kind of austerity at that time, not only among the artists’, commenting that ‘one of the things which people forget [is] that things were very thin on the ground. […] England was more England then’ (1993–1995). But when post-war austerity abated, ‘No art establishment in Britain was more wide-awake than the Royal College of Art’ (Robinson 2019). Fresh out of the RCA, a new generation of artists – Quin's – were becoming something akin to pop culture celebrities, championed in particular by figures like the young art dealer John Kasmin. Kasmin was the first British gallerist to believe in the work of David Hockney and to show colour-field painters and the large-scale works of Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, and Anthony Caro. He was also the neoteric behind the now-ubiquitous white cube gallery space. There was a deep fascination with the States, the new centre of Western art after the two World Wars having brought about a mass influx of European artists, architects and intellectuals. There, everything seemed more progressive, novel and expansive, and Quin, like so many other young, hip artists hailing from the College, wanted eagerly to go. She won her Harkness Fellowship alongside several of the artists in the New Generation 1964 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, an initiative backed by the British Council to market contemporary British art abroad. That same year, she wrote to Henry Williamson:

Have been asked by Cambridge University to give a talk […]. What I intend doing is giving a talk on the image apropos the influence films & painting have had on my own writing & follow this up by some reading of present novel. (Quin 1965)

But Quin never gave her talk, and it remains for critics to consider this connection and how her work, in novelistic terms, is sympathetic to Allan Kaprow's signal vision for their generation to ‘become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street’ (1958).

Figure 1 Ann Quin, photograph by Denise Rose Hansen, private collection, courtesy of Ann Quin's Estate

Although critics have often noted Quin's ‘literary geometry’ (Jordan 2020: 151) and ‘visual composition’ (Stevick 1989: 238), little has been made of how her use of shapes and surfaces aligns with contemporaneous developments in the realm of visual arts. This essay sets out to read sense and surface together, positing Quin's distinctive mode within an aesthetic of touch. Although I name it touch, there's a caveat: Quin's fiction is in fact more about the absence and imagining of touch than touch proper. But that is precisely my interest: to examine how the novel ministers on formal, grammatical and narrative levels to the out-of-reach, to equivocation, to openness and open-endedness, refusing binary, reactionary ways of thinking, and how this, in turn, makes for an aesthetic which aligns with broader mid-century concerns surrounding representation and performance.

As Hal Foster writes in Brutal Aesthetics (2020), the possible obliteration of the human body became horrifyingly real after the Second World War. For artists, this led to a fraught relationship with figuration on the one hand, and complete abstraction on the other. Artists like Eduardo Paolozzi, Asger Jorn, Jean Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg, who are the focus of Foster's study, instead turned to different modes of disfiguration that could, however, ‘still be presented as a realism’ (10–1), but one that was adapted to the new physical, cultural, and philosophical landscape they inhabited. Some artists went ‘so far as to see representation as an act of violence’ (2020: 11). Similar discussions were taking place in literary circles where ‘an intellectual opposition between British liberal humanism and a burgeoning continental antihumanism’ (Burley 2020: 374) proliferated. Often this was, and still is, diminished to a facile opposition between realism and experimentalism, as Julia Jordan has shown (2020). Quin refutes such an easy juxtaposition, in the same way that Oldenburg's sculptures do so between figuration and abstraction, be it his Ray Guns or his soft sculptures. While one must be careful not to conflate artistic and literary modes and movements, I do want to draw certain parallels that tell of shared cultural and aesthetic concerns and approaches to art-making. Quin, like Foster's artists, interests herself with figuration: the drawing of shapes, testing their edges, textures, and effects. And so often her figures, human or insentient, are turned toward disfiguration, ‘to an art of denatured bodies and stunted gestures’ (Foster 2020: 10). Quin's embrace of fragmentation adapts the novel form to a new post-war reality where figures, after all, still move, however twitchy, broken, or distracted they may be. She evokes her decidedly artistic intention when writing to Robert Sward: ‘In future, I’m going to ask publishers not to put “a novel” under the title page; I’d much rather let it stand as a “piece of writing” or “a work”’ (1966).

Patrick Burley notes that ‘the term “antinovel” became a byword in Britain for fiction that challenged the formal conventions established by the nineteenth-century realist novel’ (2020: 372). To critics like C.P. Snow, ‘the contemporary passion for the prefix “anti”’ was ‘an expression of that nihilism which fills the vacuum created by the withdrawal of positive directives for living, whether religious or humanist’ (1965: 30). But even if this-is-not-a-novel mini manifestos came frequently enough from 1960s writers, B.S. Johnson and J.G. Ballard included, and Quin surely distanced herself from a certain strain of English parochial writing, her statement seems less about standing in opposition to any one form than about being put off by rigid labels tout court, and that in a way I think is central to her particular aesthetic. I detect in her work the same ‘inhuman humanism’ which Foster sees in Paolozzi et al. Neither anti-human, anti-humanist, nor even anti-novel, Quin's writing is less about creating a space for death – of a literary form or otherwise – than a desire to re-animate life where it has been lost, or never permitted to live in the first place. This sentiment is quite accurately expressed in Claes Oldenburg's maxim ‘Annihilate/Illuminate’. As Foster explains, ‘to “annihilate” is only the first step; to “illuminate” – to see, to connect, to transform, to reanimate – is the important thing’ (2020: 15). And so it is here, too: Quin's disfiguration, like that of Foster's artists, is ‘less for the sake of mere disruption than in the hope of an alternative address, even another audience’ (16). In the following section, I will consider how Niklaus Largier's account of aesthetic experience as ‘touch and being touched’ is fitting for the way in which Three (1966) allows shapes to fluctuate in and out of reach, between integrity and fragmentation, ultimately handling ‘mimesis as more performative than representational’ (2013: 11).

Touching and Being Touched

Drawing on the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, Niklaus Largier asserts that ‘touch is the very possibility of getting absorbed into the effects of the figures that art deploys’ (2013: 28). Put more plainly, ‘to touch’ is, as the dictionary defines it, to affect, move, stir, arouse, make an impression on, impress, upset, disturb, melt, soften. These affective terms are central to Quin, who, to borrow Largier's phrase, makes of fiction a ‘dark stage of unknown possibilities’, concerning herself with ‘the effect of figures on it’ (2013: 26). In conceiving of touch as a possible source of intensity in the face of idleness, Three draws character and reader alike in and out of intensity, giving narrative expression to what Sara Ahmed has called ‘the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near’ (2010: 30). Going on from this, I want to suggest that Three – with its formal and narrative explorations of open-endedness, marked by opposing impulses and a proclivity for both the confining and the expansive, the futile and the potent(ial) – is a work devoted to the continuous, albeit often curtailed and desperate, hope for touching and being touched.

As Nonia Williams has written, Quin's writing is thronged with ‘“negative” effects and affects: boredom, frustration and infuriation’ (2019: 143), while Julia Jordan has observed a ‘narrative capacity for waiting, lingering, doing nothing, and for silence’ (2020: 142). I regard this dual hold of boredom and intensity as a novelistic conceptualization of Herder's ‘ground of the soul’, that is, the ‘realm of darkness and possibility from which all perception emerges’, and which

constitutes a complex intersection of sensuality, affect, perception, feeling, and imagination, and […] thus forms the basis for what in [Herder's] view is an alternative and comprehensive way of cognition where the dualism of soul and body, spirit and matter is being replaced by a playful intersection of sensual and affective experience (Largier 2013: 25).

Quin conveys something similar when telling Nell Dunn that ‘what we all want is some contact to make us feel that we do exist because beyond that there is a complete sort of void’ (Dunn [1965] 2018: 189). She goes on to describe relationships as such:

you go towards someone and you find further intensity … it exists in its own right, the thing of having moments and perhaps this is all one can have, can expect. I don't think one should expect too much, ever, or go back, one should always go forward inasmuch as here and now, the immediate. You know, what de Kooning said, “I’m not interested in space beyond putting my arms out and seeing my hand or my fingers” (201).

We are right to view Quin as a visual writer on the basis of her geometric shapes, as in Passages: ‘Angle of his body met the angles of her arms, legs. The shape of these shaped her moods. Fingers along ridges, furrows’ (1969: 60). And yet, I want to suggest that her work employs surfaces specifically to prompt something that is much deeper, more complex, exceedingly sensuous and mysterious, and to such a degree that it conceptualizes that most elusive experience of being touched – be it by an angle, an artwork, a phrase, or another person – while simultaneously exacting formal constraints to elicit the effects and affects of having that touch withheld. Put differently, Quin's writing is modulated by affective qualities arising in characters’ meetings with shapes and figures that stir the nervous system, which, in turn, mirrors the openness towards transformation that is inherent in the event of reading itself.

As Jordan has it, Quin's characters ‘are often absent or incoherent; disembodied limbs are seen via distorting perspectives, or by shards of reflections in mirrors’ (2020: 150). But as Jordan goes on to say, Quin's is ultimately a literature of possibility, precisely because of its ability to hold multiple accounts of events at the same time ‘while resisting the urge to resolve them, without turning that very resistance into an easy valorization or nihilism’ (142–3). As such, true to her existentialist disposition, Quin positions herself between inertia and potentiality.

The understanding of aesthetic experience as touching and being touched, and Three's conceptualization thereof, is doubly emblematic of 1960s art and culture. First, the focus on physical contact aligns with the onset of sexual liberation, single women gaining the right to contraception and abortion in Britain in 1967, the foregrounding of the artist's own body in Happenings and performance art, and the New-Age, often drug-fuelled, hippie movements that spread from the US to the rest of the world from the mid-sixties and into the seventies. Second, aesthetic and bodily experience was interrogated in various ways by new art movements and techniques such as Pop, Op, Minimalism, and gestural abstraction. Whether we speak of the overlapping of media in a Peter Blake collage-painting, Donald Judd's ‘specific objects’ that are neither painting nor sculpture but simply constitute serial shapes, or Bridget Riley's geometric paintings that roll and swell before the eyes of the viewer, common for the decade's artists were the questions they were raising. What should art be now? How can space, colour, form and material be made to trigger sensation, thought, or both? Across disparate practices, post-war artists steered clear of the traditionalist approaches and paradigms by which they felt visual expression was otherwise restrained. David Thompson felt that ‘British art in particular has suddenly woken up out of a long provincial doze’ (1964: 7) as the boundaries between painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, artist and viewer were corroding, with young artists challenging ‘prevailing notions of what an art object can be and how the viewer should be involved in constructing meaning’ (‘The New Situation’ 2013). Quin's formal tactics – her disjunctive mixed-media composition, encompassing dream-like passages, Beckettian tape transcripts, diary extracts, collage, graphic images, unorthodox spacing and line breaks – reflect the anti-formalism, the fragmentation of voices and viewpoints, the sensuous and often spontaneous involvement of the body the blending of high and low culture, and the ambivalence towards both that marks wider 1960s artistic culture.

In her one critical piece, a review of Samuel Beckett's How It Is, Quin describes living as like being ‘encased in dustbins, pew-like jars, mounds, bound therefore by one place. Waiting’; like ‘travelling slowly, weighed down by a sack of sardine tins. Resigned to fate – the force of nature. The only communication: a tin opener’ (1964: 191). This notion strongly pertains to her own writing, too. Moments of contact, activation, modal change and mutual recognition, however fleeting, are dropped like little tin openers in her novels, suggesting that if ‘[t]he worst enemy [is] the body, its needs, habitual functions, desires, making up a world of futility’ (191), then touch is paradoxically the only release from it.

Deferring Touch

Following an abortion, S has moved in with the married couple Ruth and Leonard. S is at once their adopted orphan, a substitute for the child they can't have (‘Nursery done in egg-shell blue. Empty’ (21)), and the lover they both fantasize about (‘Their attention held / straying elsewhere. / Someone else’ (25)), even after she disappears. One aspect of S that provokes much marital conflict is her particular poetics. Leonard tells Ruth:

we always enjoyed the scenery. Scenery? Yes you know birds flowers and things she seemed to know everything by its proper name. Made them up. How could she Ruth? (10)

Leonard is moved by S's aesthetic sense, noting that ‘she had an innate sense of rhythm’ (44) and ‘[k]new what suited her gave you some good ideas Ruth terrific sense of colour’ (10). Contrarily, Ruth is disgusted by these same attributes: ‘she looked obscene really the way her legs spread out and … . […] ugh when you danced with her I’ve never seen anything look so unnatural quite revolting’ (44). S is the young, cool, ‘Swinging Sixties’ woman who loves music, dancing, and performing. But the couple is confounded as to who she really was, her performativity seemingly obfuscating significant aspects of her identity, just as she is the only character whose initial remains her only name. Aesthetic sense and experimentation, but also well-guarded mystery, is integral to the attraction between S and Leonard, who bond over shared tastes and distastes. Meanwhile Ruth, the square of the three, claims that S only pretended to like classical music to please them. Grasping comes to refer both to not knowing – ‘I mean we can't really be sure could so easily have been an accident’ (1) – and hands frantically seizing what one wants to touch or be touched by (the hands of others, the radio, the cat, the orchids).

The novel's mixed media form and open-ended sentences pose an aesthetic extension to the couple's demotic and interruption-prone conversations, mirroring the all-consuming uncertainty surrounding S. The alienation all characters experience is treated in their respective diaries, but always ducked in conversation. S's diary drifts between exorbitant attention on objects at hand: ‘bottles, cartons, orange peel, banana skins, sanitary towels, stockings, contraceptives, gloves, boots, spare parts of prams, cars, bicycles, tins, mattresses, dolls’ (54), and off into abstraction: ‘Sun / absorbed / sinks / behind the purple’ (106). Notional possibility contrasts with the focality of the here-and-now, producing an effect vacillating between blurry and crystalline, just as the graphic surface of the text changes between dense, black blocks and white space. On both formal and narrative levels, then, lightness is countered by weight, excitement and potential by dread and futility. In this way, Three conceptualizes the plane of perception where figures, human or otherwise, may come into view and stir sensation in others. Even the most tangible evidence of S's inner life, her diary, is reduced to a mere object that Ruth and Leonard inspect only superficially. Faces are described flatly, and eyes are continually averted and described as bolts and metal bits. The attentive reader will pick up on confessional diary strands that closely align with Quin's own biography, but for the most part, S's scribbles too remain on the surface of things, registering rather than analyzing:

A dead gull. Wings spanned. Head to one side.

She shuddered at. He threw into the sea. White bones of fish.

Ivory-smooth. In solitary places. Away from the bunches

of seaweed.

sucking noises of shells. After the tide goes out. Screams from

children. The other side. Shouts of the ice cream man.

Flapping deckchair canvas

fags.

Orange peel

newspaper. Tossed over.

Paper bags. Black patches up near the grass (109).

The line changes, and the white space they afford, function both as pauses and a way of treating objects like separate recognitions, following the eye that sees. This is supported by S's particular grammar. The action ‘threw into the sea’ is separated from its object; it could refer to either the fish bones or the gull. Often a word points in two directions at once, as in a sentence like ‘the clouds were low-lying mountains couldn't be seen either’. Sentences regularly miss a pronoun, noun or verb, and speech is never signposted, whereby form and grammar extend a thematic interest in leaving open the gap between the intact and the fractured. There is an etymological connection here too: integer in Latin means whole and entire, but also untouched, unhurt, unchanged, from in + tangere (“to touch”). Three promotes touch as something that has the power both to integrate and to tear apart, to change and to leave dormant. S's impressions are immediate but provisional – qualities that alternately arouse and bore her – whereas Ruth is persistently unsettled by provisionality, reflecting that ‘things [have] to be relatively either black or white’ and that she is ‘[a]lways holding back’ (124). Playful, ‘feline’, and sensual, S comes to represent everything Ruth is unable to locate in herself, and her sessions before the mirror wearing S's clothes seem a way for her to tentatively engage with that latent side of her. As such, Ruth both envies and detests S's apparent freedom and open-mindedness, with S's alleged bad taste becoming the aesthetic extension of her unruliness: ‘Flirting with everyone waiters included and those long conversations on art you had about which she had no taste at least we re-educated her a bit on paintings’ (86).

Both women seek Leonard's attention, S through conversation, miming and invitations to come night swimming, while Ruth goes about it less boisterously. At a party, S notices how Ruth

bends, feels the light must fall just there, and waits for his touch. Of the two he flirts the more, though an unstudied approach. R conscious the whole time, aware of a hand, eye, jumps to hasty conclusions. Blushes easily. (62)

Wanting to be seen is here equivalent to wanting to be touched. When Leonard does approach Ruth, however, she is usually squeamish about his touch: ‘He leaned over, to touch her neck. She turned suddenly, arm across her face’ (77). Sensory and visual awareness sharpens when the potential for touch intensifies, countered by long expanses when nothing happens and descriptions of being alone in a room. Indeed much of the novel is written as though out of focus, however alert it is to obliquely, sometimes blindly, sensing and grasping. Herder's ‘realm of darkness and possibility’ is the same place from which Three comes staggering, insisting that fiction is a temporal and spatial realm where contact may be made. As Largier writes, visuality is the flat representation of a promise of touch; ‘a reduced version of sense experience, which replaces a more fundamental and a more comprehensive sense and sensation’ (2013: 28). To Jordan, Quin is ‘subjective inasmuch as she understands the phenomenal world as responsive to individual perception, and indeed as created by it’ (2020: 142). This aligns with Largier's point that touch is the ‘temporal and spatial involvement and abandonment where all our possibilities of perception are formed and informed by the figures that emerge before our eyes’, offering something that compared to the usual flat, concreteness of shapes and surfaces at hand is ‘decidedly more open (maybe comparable to “das Offene” in Rilke's Duineser Elegien)’ (29). Put differently, local repetitions, the presentation of diaries as text surfaces, and the description of characters in flat, geometric, and, at best, plastic terms, often like props (‘She watched him bend over the fire, straighten, his head twisting from side to side’ (126)), become aesthetic reiterations of a touch withheld. As Sianne Ngai points out, ‘Moods like irritation and anxiety […] are defined by a flatness or ongoingness’ (2005: 6–7), and this articulates the way Three makes tangible a sense of blocked contact and agency.

Literature as Dark Stage

Three plays with objects that stand out from expanses of darkness, be it glinting bronze, the way the sun ‘caught the leaves into metallic surfaces’ (69) or ‘[e]verything dripped above a brilliant green undergrowth, as if a painter, obsessed with only that colour, had swept a series of canvasses, in every possible light and shade, then varnished haphazardly, spilling over the edges’ (134). Such visual descriptions jut out from backgrounds of actual darkness or everyday tedium, even if, or perhaps especially since, characters have no ‘everyday’ as such, and rarely need to be anywhere: ‘oh God it's so dull so boring here’ (112), Ruth complains, and when she occasionally joins in on miming, she is ‘soon bored, or exhausted’ (137).

As I have been suggesting, the novel continuously purports that touch leads to possibility, and yet it is perpetually impeded. The visual focus on angles over interiority and connection with the person behind the surface stresses the tension between perception and touch. Since innermost thoughts are presented as surface texts that can easily be done away with, even when some degree of interiority is offered, we remain stuck with the thingness of thoughts on coffee-stained paper. Leonard remarks: ‘I’ve been in a trance no doubt’ (120), while Ruth ‘can feel nothing’ (124). And to S, ‘L seemed preoccupied, even when I spoke, attempted to speak, he did not listen, and if he glanced in my direction, when offering a cigarette, his eyes were glazed’ (132). Whenever someone comes into too-direct contact with another – which is usually safeguarded by any such contact being textual or screened – it provokes a violent lapse, or just instant withdrawal. This endows the novel with a certain logic: that uncertainty is attractive, and subjectivity is best held at arm's length.

Josh Powell has argued that ‘Quin's characters are able to perceive and play a part in the world […] without seeming wholly present to it’ (2020: 2). But rather than indicative of mental absence per se, as Powell suggests, I view this detachment as emblematic of the anxiety surrounding representation and (in)authentic experience which engirdles the narrative. S considers sleepwalking as this would offer the disguise needed for her to touch Leonard: only then could she ‘fling [herself] onto L's bed’ (67). Characters cloak their serpentine desires in robes and masks precisely because they feel unsure of or unpermitted to follow through with them, and roleplay becomes a space within which to test actions in staged scenarios, with the vain hope of locating authentic feelings in the process.

Julia Jordan observes that Quin's ‘statues, and dummies, and effigies’ mark ‘the ambivalence by which they exist; they are exemplary of late-modernist ontological ambiguity’ (2020: 153). This is congruous with Jason Baskin's observation that ‘ambiguity is the condition of all the knowledge, experiences and actions of embodied subjects’ (2019: 16) in much late-modernist literature that uses bodily realities ‘to imagine more capacious ways of living and acting’ (2). In other words, Three uses subjects and objects to negotiate post-war precariousness and doubts surrounding individual and collective being. With this, the aesthetic of touch – whether that touch is deferred, imagined, or, very rarely, achieved – is deeply imbricated with existential insecurities on individual, social, and necessarily political levels, encompassing a host of factors including the bomb; Britain's decline as a world power; the transition from bankruptcy to liberal capitalism and the expansion of the global consumer society; the rise of individualism; and the institutionalism of modernism, prompting what Baskin has observed as a crisis for collective, but also specifically artistic, agency. Similarly, late-modernist prose is to Jordan replete with ‘[m]etaphors of rupture [which] indicate a wider dimension of crisis, and lateness is also a marker of (obscene, shameful) survival’ (2020: 6). Shameful survival is in Three manifested via Leonard's war recollections and S reading in the newspaper about a former concentration camp officer who denies all blame, but also through the couple's confusions about their blameworthiness in relation to S's disappearance. To Jordan, such indeterminism ‘reflects late modernism's own uncertainty about progress’ and provokes an ‘anxiety about [art's] own adequacy’ (6), which is patent here but also in the work of Quin's generation of artists more generally. By stressing the very subjectivity that objects are bound up with – the fact that meaning and value is always subjective to the perceiver, and to the market – as well as a florid self-awareness and self-doubt about making art, Three emerges as an exemplary late-modernist art novel. It outlines the unsayable question few artists dared articulate expressly: What is the use of art in a blitzed landscape? What separates ‘[t]those ghastly statues of your father's too disembodied pieces of bronze stone’ from ‘bits scraps of metal’ (6–7)? Leonard remarks that S ‘certainly had talent’ while Ruth finds their mime performances ‘frankly grotesque Leon quite quite horrible ugh’ (6).

I find a useful comparison in Quin's experience as an Assistant Stage Manager at a Brighton theatre company, when she, keen on becoming an actor, auditioned at RADA but was thrown by the lack of a stage:

I expected a stage, even a platform, instead a smallish room, brightly lit; ten or twelve people faced me. I began, froze, asked to start again, but was struck dumb, and rushed out, silently screaming down Gower Street (Quin [1966] 2018: 19).

There is something about the validity afforded by a stage which Three illustrates: it is not enough for Leonard and S to mime in the empty pool in the garden, so Leonard proceeds to build a stage to ensure the most appropriate set-up for their art. In fact, Three is very much a novel about imagining what others see when they look at you: ‘Observe / to be observed’ (25)’. As Powell has highlighted, Leonard often pretends to read but is actually watching the women watching him (2020). Leonard is arguably most himself when alone with his orchids, but even then he is enclosed in a glasshouse, his obsessive fondling and spraying exposed to view. The plants move and make sucking noises at his touch, stressing the volatile boundary between thing and person. It is perhaps not accidental, then, that the broken sculptures and orchids often appear together. They do so on his video stills, and when intruders make a mess of the garden, the ‘torn orchids from the pots […] lay between scattered broken pieces of statues’ (137). If the orchids are markers of achieved touch, then the broken sculptures point towards anxieties about creating shapes that may touch others. This is clear when the intruders attack Leonard while he is performing. He goes to the police station to report them, but returns

convinced they were mad there too, he felt they hadn't really believed him, kept giving each other knowing looks, winks. As if I’d go through all the trouble of making such things up. He said, while sticking parts of sculptures together. You’ve got the cockerel's head back to front. R pointed out. Its bronzed eyes now stare from the terrace at the house (137).

Ruth's comment about the cockerel comes directly after Leonard expressing his frustration about being taken as a fake, as though similarly wrong or bad. But despite his insecurities, as Tom McCarthy has it, Leonard ‘might be viewed as a progressive, perhaps even avant-gardist’. He recycles his father's passed-down sculptures with ‘hatred of the public whom he tries to cordon off with ever-higher walls’, clearly weighed down by the older generation's value system and unsure of his own attempts (2022). Earlier, Ruth spied around in his room, finding broken sculptures under his nightstand, and asked:

Leon what's happened to those statuettes you did? Why what made you think of them? Just wondered when I made your bed didn't see them on your table that's all. Broken – yes broken – fell off. But they’re in little pieces as though … . Oh so you found them? Looks as though they’ve been trodden on or something Leon? Well they weren't much good really. Thought you considered them your best darling? Did I – how's the cat by the way? (83)

Disheartened by the result, he has broken the sculptures. As I have shown, there are related disagreements about S's artistic capabilities, but Leonard and Ruth agree that her diaries are quite ‘unreadable’.

A comparison is offered in Quin's short story with the painterly title ‘Nude and Seascape’. A man struggles to arrange a woman/sculpture/doll in the most aesthetic way possible. ‘The body, admittedly, might not be in harmony or in tone, a little too pink’, the ‘head emerging from the grey gabardine wax far from satisfactory’ (2018: 25). Here, again, Quin is getting at the artist's insecurities about their own work. As Chris Clarke asserts, Quin too had ‘apprehensions about her work's participation in the postwar public sphere’ (2015: 137), as when writing about Berg:

The proofs finally arrived, I couldn't open them, and spent the whole day vomiting from anxiety and depression. Eventually the galleys lay all over my room. The dream had been realized, but reading what I had written seemed someone else's dream. A kind of involuntary commitment. (Quin [1966] 2018: 23–4)

Clarke maintains that ‘her fear before reading her writing mirrors the faltering attempt to take to the stage that had made her decide to “be a writer. A poet”’ (137). In her writing, Quin conceptualizes this anxiety about being an artist through her characters continuously having their goals deferred, leaving the reader, ultimately, with multiple examples of what may be deemed ‘bad’ art. Reflecting the young artist's struggle to come up with the next bright idea against a background of hostility and destruction, aesthetic experience and brutality are often pegged together. S welcomes the violence against Leonard: ‘Instead of joining in, I remained by the window, my hands folded in my lap. […] All was over too soon. Though for the first time the gardens look alive. Even the statues seem human’ (136). Elsewhere, it is banality rather than brutality; S writes of how all her father wanted was ‘[s]omeone who shared everything you know a real artist complete understanding freedom yes independence and all that’ (95). But, comically yet suggestively, when his Viennese opera dream fails, all he is left with is ‘a postal course in chiropody’ (95).

Conclusion: Bad Taste and Bad Art

In the 1960s, young artists were often discredited and misunderstood by the art establishment and its institutions before gaining momentum on their own terms in what was fast becoming an exceedingly international and commercial landscape of pop culture. It took a young gallerist, Kasmin, to champion the work of David Hockney, which was otherwise taken by the fine-art bosses at the Marlborough Gallery as scruffy and unexhibitable, not dissimilar to the way Henry Williamson, in his recommendation of Quin for the Harkness Fellowship, acidly cites Arnold Bennett saying of Thomas Hardy's first novel: ‘most great writers begin clumsily, poor dears’ (Williamson 1964). Elsewhere he describes Quin's debut Berg as ‘dirty’ and ‘scatological’, noting that ‘Berg's phallic ejaculation onto the father's waistcoat, is nonsense, as well as unnecessary’ (Williamson and Quin 1964). By making literary judgments through a vocabulary of disgust, Williamson insists on his own position as an arbiter of ‘good taste’ in the face of a younger generation's attack on that very concept in their search for new modes of expression. This is made all the more flagrant when noticing that he wrote his reproval on the back of a fussy Authors’ Club message card.

A controversial moment in twentieth-century British art that further conveys such indignant reception of new forms is when the Tate Gallery's acquisition of the American minimalist artist Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (1966) spurred a public outcry. The purchase went unnoticed for several years, until an article on the Tate's recent acquisitions appeared in The Sunday Times in 1976 and pinpointed Equivalent VIII as a waste of taxpayers’ money. The work comprises 120 firebricks arranged in a rectangle, and the combination of the industrial material and the lack of a plinth (the bricks are placed directly on the gallery floor) provoked public debate on the value of art. One critic unfavourably compared the baseness of floor-bound Minimalism to the virtue of ‘hanging John Constable's works on its walls’ (Semple 1976). An especially outraged taxpayer, the chef Peter Stowell-Phillips, proceeded to pour blue food dye on the work. But in fact, Andre's installation had been mispresented. Conceived as eight different brick constellations, the way it was shown at the Tate was detached from the artist's vision of having viewers walk through a dedicated gallery space and approach the work in a relational way. As such, the episode is less suggestive of the general public being confounded by modern art than demonstrating how reception necessarily depends on how the work is handled and presented by curators and gatekeeping critics. This counts as much for the visual arts as it does for literature.

As we have seen, touch is in Three ‘always denied and in deferral’ (2020: 911), to borrow Nonia Williams's phrase. I view this subjugation of change, action, and ultimately, aesthetic experiences, as key to opening up the ‘difficult’ and ‘infuriating’ qualities of the novel (Williams 2019), but also the conversation it is having with mid-century art more broadly. S's and Leonard's anxieties about being bad artists, and Ruth's denouncement of their attempts, places into relief the position of sixties artists who, ‘dismissing an earlier generation's misplaced faith in art's autonomy, chose instead to engage lived experience directly’ (Baskin 2019: 2). As I have contended, disgust is often the aesthetic extension of apprehension and confusion. From S's abortion, of which Ruth disapproves, to Ruth's sickroom, her migraines and her abscess that to Leonard looks like ‘a rotten onion’ (2), there is something about taste and value judgements, bodily states and traumatic experiences which draws a ruptured and often squeamish subjectivity through the novel. This aligns Quin's work with the ways in which her painter and sculptor peers, at the Royal College of Art and beyond, set out to renegotiate the tenuous divides between subjectivity and objectivity, figuration and abstraction, artist and viewer, art and life, self and world. As epitomized by collage, much 1960s art, across visual and literary fields, appears purposefully displaced and incorporates scraps and shards, prompting conservative critics at the time to castigate it. ‘Ruth's anxiety revolves around what “to do” with [Leonard's sculptures]; objects must be put to use, restored into facility, or risk becoming “junk”’ (Jordan 2020: 153). Quin's work is productively read in this context: as part of a generation of artists who refuse easy categorization and traditional notions of what makes fine art, high and low culture, and who embrace the effects and affects of fragmentation, disfiguration and everyday debris to reflect reality as they were experiencing it.

To conclude, I’d like to turn to Donald Judd's seminal essay ‘Specific Objects’, in which he writes of Claes Oldenburg's Soft Switches (1975):

The trees, figures, food or furniture in a painting have a shape or contain shapes that are emotive. Oldenburg has taken this anthropomorphism to an extreme and made the emotive form, with him basic and biopsychological, the same as the shape of an object, and by blatancy subverted the idea of the natural presence of human qualities in all things (189).

What I want to delineate here is an economy between the quotidian and the strange, the remarkable and the unremarkable, which is extant across post-war art. Oldenburg's so-called anthropomorphism is extreme in that it is turned on its head, stressing that the emotive qualities of any given object depend solely on the judgement of the viewer. In narrative terms, Quin shows that whatever qualities we endow objects with, artistic or otherwise, are traceable back to ourselves alone. When the visual arts and modern criticism ceased to herald art as redemptive or indicative of any sort of definite, inherent, academic, or ultimately superior enlightenment, both began to insist not on the objective beauty of art but on its very ‘objectness’. This, of course, happened in tandem with the rise of mass consumer culture (seen also in the introduction of Graphic Design as a discipline at the RCA in the 1960s, directly catering to a new world of advertising), along with the rapid expansion of the art market. Now, determining what an artwork signifies, whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, along with its fiscal value, no longer hinges exclusively on sovereign judgement, but on the liberal marketplace and individualist opinion.

Like mid-sixties visual art that ‘stages or performs its disintegrating effects’ (Fer 1999: 36), Quin's particular aesthetic of touch is alert to what is close at hand, but equally to what is not, quite, there. Disfiguration, fragmentation, and collage signal in Quin not nihilism or anti-humanism, but the very human anxiety which the creation of complete, one-sided narratives and images was becoming bound up with for artists and writers alike in the post-war period. Objects may arouse intense feelings, posing tenuous meeting points between two entities. In between those moments, the plane of perception is dark, often boring. And yet it is precisely these expanses of nothingness that amplify how something may, at any given time, offer itself up as what Quin called ‘a tin opener’: a sense of release, a flicker of recognition; a moment of touch.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership and conducted in part during an AHRC-funded Research Fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art. Deep thanks are owed to Julia Jordan and Linda Freedman.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).